We don’t have a cat! Don’t tell Reba!

You can still enter my Life is Good giveaway! Go here and just leave a comment! I’ll announce the winner on Monday March 30!(Closes Friday at midnight!)

We Don’t Have a Cat…don’t tell Reba!

We can’t have a cat. The Husband has asthma and cats seem to cause  flare ups. Also, he doesn’t like cats. (Seems they don’t love you like pups do…)

But Reba doesn’t know this. Reba is our stray. She was a kitten when she decided she would be living under our deck last autumn. A little gray Siamese, who was terrified of people. We would see her in the yard or on the front porch but she never let us get close. I was in denial, “I’m sure she belongs to someone” I said over and over. But both The Husband and I knew the truth…she was a stray and she’d picked our house as her home.

When a neighborhood dog got loose and chased Reba up a tree one night and The Husband and I nearly had heart attacks. I insisted The Husband get our tallest ladder and try to climb the tree…Reba went higher to avoid the scary man on the ladder. I got my friend Ruthie to call her firefighter friend to beg him to bring the truck over and rescue Reba.

“She’ll freeze tonight” I reasoned. Seems that firefighters do not rescue cats in my neck of the woods…he said this: “Have you ever seen a cat dead in a tree, she will find her way down when she gets too cold.” (Well of course you never see a cat dead in a tree, she would fall out of the tree the minute she took her last breath! Did he think I was stupid!?)
 The Firefighter was right however at some point in the frigid night, Reba found her way down safely. That night sealed the deal for me, we have a cat. But The Husband kept fighting the inevitable…

“We are absolutely not feeding this cat” he said no less than a hundred times a day. She needs to move on and find another home…”

I never fed her. I did however start leaving the trash can open at night and I’m pretty sure she enjoyed feasting on whatever leftovers I threw out that day.

Then in December, the temperatures dipped below freezing and I heard the garage door go up…just a little. The Husband came upstairs with a strange look on his face… “I opened the garage a little bit so that Reba could come in tonight, it’s going to be too cold for her out there.” Oh that man is nothing if he’s not a softy!

We feed Reba once a day now. Annnd, when I say “we” I mean: The Husband! He even remembers to buy the smelly canned food every week. Reba still won’t let us near her but we leave the garage open so she can come in and get warm when it’s cold. I talk to her when I see her playing in the yard. She glares at me as if to say… “ Are you speaking to me Woman?” I hear The Husband saying “Kitty, kitty, kitty…” when he puts her food out at night. If we ever win her trust we’ll take her to the vet for shots…we’re trying but she’s leary!

We call her Reba because she’s a survivor. She was only a kitten when she first came to us and now full grown, she’s beautiful and brave.  Remember the TV show: Reba? And the song…”I’m a survivor” At our house we do love survivors…even if they are feline.

So, here’s the question of the day…have you ever given a stray animal a home?